Monthly meetings this spring are held at the Alice Hardie Stevens CenterMeetings are the third Tuesday of each month (September-November and January-May). Various speakers present local history and new research about the great state of Wyoming!

Brett Breithaupt and Jack Deibert will discuss the highlights of their 2016 book “Tracks, Trails, and Thieves: The Adventures, Discoveries, and Historic Significance of Ferdinand V. Hayden’s 1868 Geological Survey of Wyoming and Territories.” Most of the expedition’s activities took place in southern Wyoming in conjunction with the building of the transcontinental railroad. The railroad’s construction activities caused Hayden to have serendipitous encounters with legendary army generals, politicians, businessmen, photographers,geologists, and thieves, many of whom significantly changed the course and scope of the survey.

Brendon George is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently completing a dissertation entitled “Mile High Metropole: Denver and the U.S. Empire,” an exploration of Denver’s post-World War II relationship with the federal government. He currently lives in Cheyenne, WY.

“Defense Hub of the Nation”: Cold War Warriors in Northern Colorado and Wyoming

During the Cold War, westerners in Northern Colorado and Wyoming lived in a region the Rocky Mountain News called the “Defense Hub of the Nation.” The newspaper coined the name in response to the efforts of both service members and private citizens in the area who committed themselves to manufacturing and maintaining a nuclear arsenal. This talk explores the creation of this functional region through analyzing how the federal government utilized vast sums of public money to enfold these westerners into a Cold War political economy animated by national security concerns.

John Richard Waggener, Associate Archivist at the UW American Heritage Center, has just released a new book, Snow Chi Minh Trail: The History of Interstate 80 between Laramie and Walcott Junction, published by the Wyoming State Historical Society, a non-profit membership-driven educational organization.

The title comes from long-haul truckers who dubbed Interstate 80 (specifically the 77-mile stretch between Walcott Junction and Laramie) the “Snow Chi Minh Trail,” a negative reference to the similarly mountainous roadway used by North Vietnamese soldiers to reach South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. “Those guys saw a lot of action and relived some of it as they drove across I-80,” said Waggener, adding “Not many stretches of highway across America have generated so much interest to fill the pages of a book, but Interstate 80 between Laramie and Rawlins is one of those exceptions.”